 | | | | | Durability |  |
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A building is subject to many external and internal factors that can affect the performance of the materials it is clad in and ultimately the life span of the building itself. Here we introduce the main factors that can affect the durability of a building envelope and the way in which Corus has used these to design and develop Colorcoat® products over forty years to offer long-term performance and appearance. Corus expertise in the area of durability and our understanding of the impact that different substrate and paint formulations can have, forms the basis of the comprehensive Confidex® guarantee for Colorcoat HPS200® Ultra and Colorcoat Prisma® products.
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| |  The performance expectations for pre-finished steel for construction are extremely high, with demands for guaranteed long service lives, high flexibility and high aesthetic quality. The overall durability of the pre-finished steel product will depend on the metallic coating type used, pre-treatment chemistry, primer quality, topcoat paint quality and thickness, manufacturing process quality and consistency.
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| |  All products used for exterior applications are designed to withstand the environment. But all are, to some extent, affected by it.
The main environmental factors which degrade pre-finished steel products are: water, oxygen and salts; sunlight; chemicals and pollutants; abrasives such as wind-blown sand and salts.
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| |  In choosing the correct pre-finished steel for a particular internal environment, the following factors should be borne in mind, risk of condensation, aggressivity, damage potential, and hygiene requirement.
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| |  To ensure the durability of a particular pre-finished steel product, Corus use a combination of both laboratory and real-world testing.
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| |  A Colorcoat® pre-finished steel product from Corus is one that has undergone many years of development and optimisation. Each of the individual elements which make up the pre-finished steel product is specially selected to give optimum performance and to work together so that the final product is much greater than the sum of its parts.
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| |  Information regarding the general performance of generic pre-finished steel topcoats such as PVDF, Plastisol and Polyesters.
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| |  In specifying pre-finished steel cladding, it is important to match up the durability requirements of the specific project with the cladding product used.
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| |  Abrasion can be caused by a variety of airborne particles such as wind blown sand and salts. Abrasion resistance has many manifestations, but can be typified by the effect of blowing sand. As in all aspects of durability, not all pre-finished steel products are the same in their resistance to abrasion. Probably the most visual method of assessing this type of robustness is the falling sand method. This specifies the volume of sand which must fall on the painted surface to cause a specified amount of removal of paint from the surface.
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| |  Chemicals and pollutants can create an aggressive atmosphere which can reduce the performance life of a pre-finished steel product not suited to that environment. They can range from detergents and solvents used for cleaning to typical exterior industrial atmospheres which may contain pollutants such as sulphurous and nitrous gases and also traces of airborne solvents.
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